If there were such a thing as a Writer Genie, I'd only have one wish to ask of it: please make me more prolific. Actually, that's not true. Since childhood, I've urged every character in every tale to ever feature the standard three wishes to simply ask for an infinite number of wishes, but to no avail. Why doesn't anyone ever think of that?
Ha. But anyway, where was I? Oh right. Prolific. You've heard the phrase "verbal diarrhea," right? Well, I suffer from the polar opposite. Consonantal constipation. In short, I need a lexicographic laxative.
But today, thanks to the efforts of some fine colleagues, I and those very same compadres have (to mercifully change the metaphor) added a few more blocks of ice to the glacially expanding edifice of our written output. The story behind Seasons is as serendipitous as the stories within Seasons, if that makes sense. At some point last September, a story about a troubled young woman wrestling with self-destructive impulses appeared to me almost unbidden. No doubt it emerged from a subconscious filled with the real life horror stories of young people who are so often dealt a cruel and arbitrary hand before they're even born. "Summer Long" is a difficult character study, dark and anxious and fearful. But I think it said what I'd needed to say. Then a chance exchange in the comments section (you can read how it all unfolded here) resulted in a chain reaction in which Edward Lorn, JD Mader and Jo-Anne Teal each began to add a new, related story, a season at a time, until we ended up with this delicately balanced quartet of tales poised between oblivion and redemption.
And now, you can buy the collected stories for an insanely low price, and better yet, know that 100 percent of the royalties will go to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Yeah, the four of us won't see a single penny. (Which is good, as half the authors here are Canadian and pennies are now outlawed in Canada. It's true.)